The crossword puzzle, scrambled word game Jumble.RTM. and Scrabble.RTM. are just a few of the many popular word puzzles played throughout the world. These word puzzles, while being fun, enjoyable and rewarding, are also frequently quite frustrating. Anyone who has ever done a challenging word puzzle is well aware of how frustrating it is to have obtained some of the letters in a word puzzle, while not being able to solve the one, or more, missing letter which is necessary to the puzzle's solution. With some puzzles the answers are found on another page of the publication, or are published at some future time. A typical word puzzle solver often believes, however, that referring to the answers constitutes cheating, and that with just a little help a solution to the unsolved word could indeed be obtained.
One example of a word puzzle aid is the popular crossword puzzle dictionary. In order to use the crossword puzzle dictionary, however, one must know at least the first few letters of the word to be solved. More importantly, this kind of dictionary removes all of the fun in solving a word puzzle by providing the unknown word in whole. Another problem with the crossword puzzle dictionary is that it is a fixed medium which makes it difficult to visualize the possible combinations of unknown letters that may be combined with the known letters to form the unknown word.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to provide a word puzzle aid for assisting in the determination of a word by combining unknown letters with the letters known to be a part of the word to be solved.
Another object of the invention is to provide assistance in solving for an unknown word in a puzzle, based on some known letters, in a way which permits the maximum fun and challenge that is inherent in word puzzles.
A further object of the invention is to provide a word puzzle aid which progressively supplies clues towards solving for an unknown word in a word puzzle.
It is yet another object of the invention to provide a word puzzle aid which permits the visualization of both vertically and horizontally positioned words in a word puzzle.